by Tim Riley
Lennon lost himself in a flurry of new projects with Ono. For their first several weeks together, John and Yoko mooched beds off London friends, first at McCartney’s house in St. John’s Wood, then at Apple A&R man Peter Asher’s place, then Neil Aspinall’s before settling into Ringo’s empty Montagu Street apartment in late July, where they stayed through the end of 1968. Their intense rapport manifested itself immediately; a new creative chemistry infused a series of side projects as Lennon recorded his Beatle material. Before they even moved out of Kenwood, Lennon and Ono shot an experimental movie, Film No. 5 (Smile), a long, sustained take of Lennon smiling on his back porch, as if one of those indelible facial frames from A Hard Day’s Night got elongated into a Warhol feature. They also made the film Two Virgins, which debuted at the Chicago Film Festival later that fall. And paralleling the Beatles sessions throughout the summer of 1968, Lennon mounted his first art show and visited rehearsals for Victor Spinetti’s staging of In His Own Write, a one-act production of the National Theatre at the Old Vic (produced by Sir Laurence Olivier). He may not have dealt with his drug habit, but he certainly rousted himself from boredom.
A casual afternoon song-demo session at George Harrison’s Esher home has been widely bootlegged as “the Esher Demos,” the most complete record of the band’s familiar preproduction routine: like a script’s first table read, or a newsroom’s first editorial meeting of the day, song run-throughs preceded discussion of a general outline for an album as material got sketched out for the first time. As with the Hamburg Star-Club tapes from New Year’s Eve, 1962, this tape reveals how thoroughly conceived and arranged most of this White Album material already was even at this early “demonstration” phase. Each songwriter prepared his own demo tape to sing along to, to suggest vocal harmonies, rhythmic figures, and guitar breaks. There were at least two tape recorders in the room, since whoever taped this session (most likely Aspinall) caught Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison singing along with themselves, with Ringo chiming in on congas for a sound unlike any other. This uncanny setup displays the band’s elaborate shorthand, where even early drafts graduate from lyrics and melodies to band music as it would ultimately be produced for tape. Far from sketchy, early drafts of most Beatles songs arrive fully conceived, with imaginative spaces mapped out for the others. Production blueprints were inseparable from song arrangements. Even unfinished songs like “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “Sexy Sadie” give off an underlying ensemble energy, grooves so suggestive you can almost feel the others eager to add their as-yet-invisible parts. The distance between the Esher Demos and The White Album is largely technical; the raw material is all there.
Perhaps, in Lennon’s mind, his harried schedule provided an excuse to avoid his wife and son. Apple aide Peter Brown turned into Lennon’s royal go-between, fending off Cynthia’s frequent phone calls. Finally, after many, many queries, Brown confirmed a time for Lennon to discuss matters in person with his wife at Kenwood. When Cynthia opened the front door, she found Yoko standing beside him, both of them dressed in black.
“I barely recognized John,” Cynthia noted, and she worried about his drug use; although the remote air of her husband’s new companion must have slighted her. “It had been only a few weeks since we’d last met, but he was thinner, almost gaunt. His face was deadly serious. There was no hint of a smile, even when Julian ran up to him. He was, quite simply, not the John I knew. It was as if he’d taken on a different persona. . . . What power did she have over him? The thought of her looking after my son was ghastly.”2
The couple sat awkwardly in Lennon’s former living room as Julian hovered about them, staring wide-eyed at his father’s new partner. Such a scene is unsettling for any child, but it must have been particularly traumatic for Julian, who saw his father so rarely in the first place. “What did you want to see me for?” Lennon began impatiently. In the past, he had avoided confrontation with women at all costs, and he had gone to great lengths to avoid this one. But when finally forced to meet with his wife and child, he came out blasting, no matter how hypocritically. Cynthia sent Julian to her mother in the kitchen, tracing the very same steps Lennon had taken at the same age of five when Julia confronted Alfred in Blackpool. Here, the roles reversed: instead of the mother unwittingly rescuing the boy from abduction to New Zealand, Lennon came to threaten Cynthia and virtually ignored Julian.
Once the boy had left the room, Lennon threw a curveball, with Ono sitting calmly at his side. He accused Cynthia of cheating on him, with “that yankee cowboy,” he hissed, the actor Tom Simcox, her Rishikesh friend whose note Mardas had purloined. This betrays a deeply cynical streak: as a tactical matter, Lennon may have reasoned the angle worth a try even if false, since he could afford more expensive lawyers and massage his story later through Apple’s publicity machine. After all, he was a championship talker, and commanded fairly reverential treatment from the press when he so desired. Putting Cynthia on the defensive constituted his best strategy for that, given that he would soon be negotiating a settlement. This maneuver backfired.
The other cynical motive behind Lennon’s accusation played to the issue of public identity: no matter how this situation unraveled, Cynthia and Julian stood to be big losers. Cynthia’s status greatly depended on her being Mrs. Lennon. As the mother of his only child, this got tied up with the only reason she would have tolerated all his infidelities for so long, or roped her mother into the many indignities of his celebrity lifestyle. To sit still for his accusations in her own home created a new low for Cynthia to contemplate from the marriage that she had hoped to salvage just weeks before. If anything could have upstaged her arriving home from Greece to find Yoko Ono padding around in her robe, this would be it. His attack, both humiliating and unexpected, shocked Cynthia to her chair. It’s easy to imagine a weaker character cracking up on the spot. John and Ono left quickly after that first encounter, without John so much as hugging Julian. After a few days, Cynthia collected herself and countersued, giving London divorce lawyers a taste of Beatle litigation yet to come.
With John finessing his silent treatment, the other Beatles retreated where they would have otherwise been in touch with Cynthia on at least a weekly basis—Ringo, after all, was still a neighbor. But Paul, reflecting a deep sense of personal honor, was the only one to pay Cynthia and Julian a visit. After his fallout with Jane, he found himself single, and full of regrets. He knew Cynthia well enough to pay his personal respects. He brought small comfort, and a big song:
The only person who came to see me was Paul. He arrived one sunny afternoon, bearing a red rose, and said, “I’m so sorry, Cyn, I don’t know what’s come over him. This isn’t right.” On the way down to see us he had written a song for Julian. It began as “Hey Jules” and later became “Hey Jude,” which sounded better. . . . Paul stayed for a while. He told me that John was bringing Yoko to recording sessions, which he, George and Ringo hated.3
Beyond the echoes of Alfred and Julia, this romantic impasse parallels the crossroads Lennon and McCartney encountered five years earlier, when Lennon married Cynthia with the quaintest of old-fashioned motives: to put a respectable face on his indiscretions.4 In McCartney’s mind, Lennon’s first marriage appeared rash and unwise. Still, everybody liked Cynthia: knowing Lennon’s unpredictability, everybody benefited from her reliable emotional anchor and unswerving devotion. Suddenly, for Lennon, these qualities counted for far less than creative stimulation.
Visiting her in the midst of John’s new fling, which would hopefully blow over any week now, Paul sang Cynthia an early draft of a new song, inspired by the child Lennon couldn’t bear to confront (“Hey Jules, don’t make it bad/Take a sad song and make it better”). After all, McCartney had known the boy’s namesake, Lennon’s mother (Julia, Julian, Jude), and the melody swelled with redemption to all who heard it. The romantic fallout at the heart of the band—between two songwriters who had no zipper control—became the subject of the song that revived the Beatles’ bond with their
audience, beating out even “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” and “Yesterday” to become their best-selling single. In the days they spent working out the song before recording, Lennon heard his own situation in early McCartney drafts (“You have found her, now go and get her”) and pronounced it finished by barely touching it. Depending on your vantage point, keeping his fingerprints off McCartney’s lyric was either the most selfish, or the most generous, response Lennon could have had.
With so much fresh material, White Album sessions began in promise before splaying every which way as personality conflicts flared. The week after the songs were demo’d at the Esher meeting, the band gathered at EMI to give “Revolution” eighteen takes, adding overdubs to create Lennon’s lead vocal takes (sung lying on his back) through takes 19 to 20. But the track ran to over ten minutes, trailing off into a fascinating distention of sound effects, pillow talk, and garbled radio. Lennon simply cut the final four minutes and began piecing together an entirely new track, which became “Revolution 9.”
Yoko kept a revealing audio journal of this early “Revolution” session, which still circulates among bootleggers for rare insight into her state of mind. “You mustn’t do anything without me!” she tells John. She praises Paul for communicating with her as an equal and even professes that she has grown to like him as “a younger brother.” When John goes up to the control booth, however, Yoko claims to be “the most insecure person in the world right now,” clearly terrified that John will abandon her and return to his family at any moment.5
By now, Yoko had graduated from “flavor of the month”—her early Apple nickname—to an appendage, and Lennon’s grace period with the press quietly lapsed. The couple made their first public appearance together at the National Sculpture Exhibition in Coventry, where they planted acorns for peace at Coventry Cathedral on June 15. After that, reporters pounced. On June 18, Lennon brought Yoko Ono to the opening night of In His Own Write at the Old Vic.
The confidence he displayed in his music rang smug as he paraded his new lover on his arm in public. Lennon had no patience for how long it took the rest of the world to catch up with his personal life; he simply behaved as though people should get accustomed to his new flame and pay attention to his work. Throughout the spring, he had brainstormed with Victor Spinetti to shape his verse for the stage, and Spinetti remembers this collaboration more than the media commotion. The two rarely discussed the personal upheaval Lennon was traveling through. “Backstage after the first night, he came up to me beaming, and said, ‘Victor you cunt! [a Scouser endearment]. You reminded me of all the things that got me started in this stuff before rock ’n’ roll came along.’ ” 6 The press, however, blared the bigger story. Reporters yelled, “Where’s your wife, John?” as John and Yoko ran into the theater. The next morning, infidelity headlines upstaged his leap to theater. Still in shock, Cynthia and Julian watched the paparazzi hound him from where they had fled in Italy.
Rumors hit the street that the Beatles were recording again, and Apple projects quickly competed with one another for attention and studio time. McCartney produced and promoted Mary Hopkin, Apple signed a new group called Grapefruit, and life around the 95 Wigmore Street offices took on a surreal air of playing at the music business. The Beatles came and went, dashing off ideas and plunking themselves down into studios for consults. While creative in intent, most Apple endeavors now swirled with chaos.7
Peter Asher, Jane’s older brother, had come aboard as an A&R man and soon brought in a young singer-songwriter named James Taylor. When Starr and Harrison flew to California, where Harrison was to appear in a Ravi Shankar documentary, McCartney hung back to tape “Blackbird,” and Lennon and Ono collected EMI sound effects for “Revolution 9.” When Harrison and Starr returned, McCartney took off to promote Mary Hopkin in Los Angeles and Harrison helped Lennon with “Revolution 9.” Harrison skipped the brass session for “Revolution 1,” though, to produce and play his underrated “Sour Milk Sea” for Jackie Lomax, his own Apple signing.
In Lennon’s mind, no theatrical premiere impeded work on his tracks. Sessions forged ahead with Martin’s new twenty-year-old assistant, Chris Thomas, as Lennon led his band through an obstacle course called “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” With its trapdoor transitions and pointed counterrhythms, the number tested every facet of the Beatles’ ensemble, and they spent a whole session leaping its hurdles in rehearsal before devoting another full recording day to seven takes. The final six-count guitar break held back a flood of energy before opening the spigot into the fade-out, cowbells flailing. Other tracks ambled off into multiple takes that never found traction. The sheer number of songs they pounded out created an exhausting schedule; and unlike previous years, when the sessions had rewarded concentration with ingenuity, these sessions began to drag. Band members routinely avoided one another’s songs, and engineers dodged Lennon numbers instead of jockeying for the chance to work with him.
Some weeks the schedule scans as though Lennon simply hadn’t the time to notice, or care, what others thought, never mind sleep. On July 1, John and Yoko launched a joint gallery exhibition, titled You Are Here, at the Robert Fraser Gallery near the British Museum. From there, they released 365 white helium balloons with messages encouraging people to send return notes on where the balloons were found. The next day they jumped right back into work on Lennon’s “Good Night,” which he had tracked alone on guitar for Martin to score for strings, and then “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the first sketch of which included only Ringo and Paul in seven takes. Saxes were overdubbed onto that sketch before the whole thing was wiped and restarted, with twelve takes at Lennon’s new tempo on July 8.
Fed up with McCartney’s endless fussing over this ditty, Lennon, lead engineer Geoff Emerick remembers, cracked after endless takes chasing McCartney’s precise instructions. “I am fucking stoned!” Lennon declared, “and this is how the fucking song should go!”8 With that, he hammered out a quicker intro on the piano that gave the sing-songy tune some sardonic bite. That evening, the band minus Lennon and Ono attended the press screening for Yellow Submarine. They returned the next day to remake “Revolution” at a quicker tempo, after vetoing Lennon’s desire to make their first attempt the next Beatles single. It’s too slow, came the band’s response. Lennon’s new arrangement roared off a blast of overloaded lead guitar that quotes Pee Wee Gayton’s “Do Unto Others,” a 1954 Imperial side.
Two weeks after the gallery exhibition, on July 15, as the Beatles started work on “Cry Baby Cry,” Apple moved from Wigmore Street to 3 Savile Row, the address seen in the movie Let It Be. The next day, after ten more takes on “Cry Baby Cry,” in which the Beatles barely seemed to cooperate with one another, never mind the technicians, Geoff Emerick walked out, calling the atmosphere “poisonous”: “If anybody of the band members had done anything that an overly defensive John viewed as a potential slight to his new girlfriend—who sat by his side impassively the entire time they were making the album—he would be lashing out at them all with his acid tongue.”9
Lennon was so happy with the “Revolution” remake, he pitched that as their next single. The song Cynthia heard when McCartney came to console her, however, quickly bumped Lennon’s headline. (While Lennon and McCartney worked on this new number, Harrison went into Studio 2 and laid down an acoustic take of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”) The finished song, “Hey Jude,” became famous as a collaboration story: McCartney introduced Lennon to the melody with a “dummy” (or placeholder) lyric, hoping Lennon could punch it up. Lennon, disappointed about redoing “Revolution,” was nonplussed at what his partner had come up with. According to myth, Lennon signed off on McCartney’s “dummy” lyrics at first pass.
“We’re both going through the same bit,” Lennon announced, after taking the line “You have found her, now go and get her” literally.10 However, we now know they spent at least one entire day on “Hey Jude” alone together at McCartney’s hou
se before a week’s worth of sessions at two different studios, so they probably worked this lyric harder than they let on. Like “Yesterday,” or “In My Life,” each of which went through many drafts, “Hey Jude” sounds too cleanly born to be free of effort. It’s the highest kind of art: that which conceals its craft.
The track’s effortless feel belies its bumpy recording. They rehearsed “Hey Jude” assiduously before tracking six takes of it at the first EMI session and adding another twenty-three takes the next day. But slower grooves can be demanding in curious ways, and capturing this one proved elusive. A documentary film crew attended one of these sessions, filming McCartney at the piano, Ringo on drums, and Lennon playing acoustic guitar, with Harrison up in the booth alongside Martin and engineer Ken Scott. This session ended with a terrible row about Harrison’s lead guitar line, which McCartney vetoed. They weren’t in a rush, but EMI was inexplicably booked, and they still wanted to improve the basic track.
To keep the musical momentum rolling, they booked more sessions, plus an orchestra, at a new Soho shop across town called Trident, which boasted London’s first operational eight-track recorder. Tony Bramwell remembers EMI treating new technology “like the Enigma decoding machine that they cracked at Bletchley and drove off in an olive-green camouflaged truck with an armed guard to be returned—sometimes months later—like a new rocket installation, under conditions of great secrecy.”11 This put the Beatles in the awkward position of “inventing” eight-track recording procedure—by linking two four-track machines for eight-track simulation on Sgt. Pepper—but unable to use it for their follow-up. The fourteen-hour Trident session remade the basic rhythmic track and received new bass, lead and backing vocals, and Martin’s orchestration the second day. More overdubs and mixing took place on a third.